Family portraits rarely turn out perfect, and if they don’t – and you have them online somewhere – the may end up here:http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com
There are some REALLY bad ones on here. Some are just kind of bad, but you know these guys regret this photo today:

Over the weekend, my mom volunteered to watch Sean so Emily and I could go out to the movies – we haven’t done that since New Years. We tried to go all out and site in the fancy-pants seating at the new theatre in Florence, KY but it was sold out. We opted for Slumdog Millionaire. I heard it was a good movie, but didn’t know what to expect. Both Emily and I really enjoyed the movie. I’ll probably rent it when it comes out on video and watch it again.
According to Wikipedia, the movie cost around $15 million to produce. As of yesterday, it grossed $189 million worldwide. Thats great news right? It is until I found out today that the kids from the movie – after having a huge Oscar premiere and trip to Disneyland – are now back in the slums from which they were discovered.
The youngest boy who played Salim has taken ill and was was caught on film being beaten by his father. Rubiana who played the young Latika is still starry eyed in the slums – still wearing the light blue dress she wore to the Oscars.
The article says the kids were paid, but it is in a trust fund that they can’t touch until they are 18. I’m guessing they probably weren’t compensated as a child actor from the west.
I hope, with the ~$174million the production has grossed, they will make something right about this.

I stumbled across a video of the band called “Band from TV” and watched the video that I will embed below. Its comprised of a bunch of actors from current/past TV shows like Heroes, House, Desperate Housewives and others. Here is a Synopsis from their Website:

The Band From TV lineup includes a powerhouse of well-known and acclaimed actors including: Greg Grunberg (drums), a veteran of shows such as Alias and Felicity and currently starring in the NBC hit HEROES; Teri Hatcher (vocals) currently starring in the ABC hit DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, James Denton (guitar), currently starring in the ABC hit DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES; Bob Guiney (vocals), who appeared on THE BACHELOR and is currently seen on TLC’s DATE MY HOUSE; Bonnie Somerville (vocals), starring in ABC’s new fall series CASHMERE MAFIA; Jesse Spencer (violin) currently starring in the FOX hit HOUSE; and rounding out the band are accomplished musicians Chris Kelley, Barry Sarna, Jon Sarna, Chris Mostert and child-star turned bass player Brad Savage.

Pretty impressive bunch actually. They play for charity, and they do a good job.

*edit: i tried to post from my cell phone…but the box to type the actual blog didn’t show up so I couldn’t finish it*
Well, for the first time in probably 6 years, I had a hard drive failure. This happened in my new PC – the one I built about 3 or so months ago. The drive is under warranty, but of course, that does nothing for my data. I’ve been able to pull off my thunderbird mail files – haven’t tested their integrity yet. Glad I could get those, as I have just about all my emails since 2001 or 2002 and would die if I lost all those.
Once I have it up and running, I’ll sign up for Carbonite.com’s service and start my backups again with Comodo Backup (free!).
It woudl be one thing if I heard the drive clicking or saw error messages in the Windows Syslog – but no. The PC locked up on Sunday afternoon, then bluescreened. I rebooted and it was trying to load GRUB off one of my secondary drives (guess it was installed on there from some previous install). Wierd…booted with an XP cd and the pc was assigning my XP drive with an E:. Reloaded the windows boot loader and reset the MBR only to have it reboot into XP and immediately bluescreen. Wonderful. Guess I know what I’ll be doing over the next few days – trying to recover data, and reinstalling Windows. I had XP Pro 64bit this last time ardound. Maybe I will go Vista Ultimate 64 bit this time. Of..maybe I’ll toss it all away and install Ubuntu. Its worked well for months on my laptop and I’m addicted to Frozen Bubble 🙂
Lesson learned:
No more OEM harddrives for me. Retail only.

The new Knight Rider series was just scheduled for nine more episodes. If you haven’t seen the show…please…don’t bother. It is TERRIBLE.
1. The acting is not even on par with a high school play.
2. The special affects are the worst
3. The in car scenes are 80’s-ariffic! For example, a week or so ago, he was racing a Ford GT40. From the in car view, looking backwards, you could “see” out of most of the windows. The GT was no where to be seen. Moments later, they did an aerial shot and the ford was right behind the Mustang on the driver’s side. Clearly a stock window scene was being used.
4. The plots. They are stolen from popular movies. Last week (I did not watch it) was a “Crank” based plot where he was injected with a poison. The week before had a “Fast and The Furious” theme where he had to disguise himself as a drag racer to get stolen weapons back. The week before that was a “pretend i am a surfer” ‘Point Blank’ theme.
5. did I mention the acting?

GlassBooth is another one of those websites that can help you decide which candidate more closely matches your opinion about different areas in politics. What I found different with this site is it actually tells you why you don’t match a candidate for the particular area.